Sunday, April 24, 2016

A few weeks ago I
went to a screening of Nicholas Ray’s The
Lusty Men at the Cinematheque. I’ve read about this film ever since I
became interested in movies, but I’d never had a chance to see it before. Just
one of those things, I supposed. It was worth the wait – the film is one of
Ray’s most powerful, melancholy works.

Before the
screening, Cinematheque programmer James Quandt stood up and talked about the
print. He said that in the course of putting the Ray season together, he’d
discovered that The Lusty Men had
become extremely hard to find. Specifically, he’d only been able to locate four
prints of the film: two in 16mm, one in Belgium, and the one we were about to
see. He apologized for what he called the “fair” condition of the print. It was
mostly OK, but looked at times as though it was falling apart on the screen. Maybe
from the pressure of being the only 35mm Lusty
Men on the continent.

The Lusty Men

Well, this was the
same weekend as the global protests against the war in Iraq, and any number of
other things that count for more than the fate of an old movie. But I was
fairly stunned at this revelation. The
Lusty Men is part of the standard vocabulary of movie writing, referred to
routinely as an important, even necessary film. I don’t ever remember reading
about it being particularly rare in the way that, say, Vertigo was for a while. Maybe the truth is people haven’t
realized. Maybe the movie’s slipped from our grasp, and we haven’t noticed.

If the movies were
just about the art, maybe we should put creation on hold for a few years and
just pour the money into safeguarding the art we already have. Of course, it’s
more about the commerce. And art doesn’t function with such rationality anyway.

The threat to The Lusty Men illustrates one of the
ways in which the fate of movies seems to me an unusually random thing. Another
example is how slight changes in audience perception or acceptance make a huge
difference – economically of course, but also in the judgment of history. Take
a film like Narc, which opened this
January. I was reading about it for months before the release – about the buzz
from Sundance, about how Tom Cruise loved it, about how it reinvented the genre
and was going to get an Oscar nomination at least for Ray Liotta and maybe for
much more than that.

Well, the awards all
passed Narc by, it didn’t get much of
an audience, and that’s that – we’ll never ever hear much more about it. There
have been hundreds of such movies – bathed in promise for a little while, but
ending up in obscurity. But if things had gone a little differently, who knows?

I thought Narc was a pretty generic movie,
tiresomely shot, and it made no impact on me at all. Ron Shelton’s current film
Dark Blue is a much more interesting
entry in the same vein. This movie never had any pre-release buzz at all, and
the conventional wisdom is that anything getting its premiere in February can’t
be worth too much. But it’s an entirely engrossing, muscular film, even if it
flirts with melodrama a bit too openly.

Dark Blue

I don’t know much
about director Ron Shelton, but based on what I know, I like the idea of him.
He’s usually made movies set around sports, to the point where he seems almost
obsessed: White Men Can’t Jump (basketball),
Cobb and Bull Durham (baseball), Tin
Cup (golf), Play it to the Bone
(boxing). But he also made Blaze,
about Southern politics in the 1950s, and he wrote Under Fire, the movie about journalists in 1979 Nicaragua. This
seems to demand some remark about the axis between sports and politics, but I’m
not sure what that should be. Maybe Shelton is primarily interested in
exploring the nuances of a structure, people functioning within (and testing
the edges of) a set of rules – sports and politics being two convenient vessels
for this project.

And now he’s taken
on the workings of the notorious Los Angeles Police Force, depicted here at the
height of its notoriety – the five days leading to the Rodney King verdict (and
ensuing riot) in 1991. Kurt Russell (in career-best form) plays one of those
patented movie cops who’s gone way over the line and rationalized it to the
ultimate degree. As in Training Day,
there’s a younger partner who’s struggling with the ethos. The movie immerses
itself in the cop culture with a fastidiousness reminiscent of Sidney Lumet
movies like Prince of the City and Q&A, but there’s a greater relish to
it. Of course, there’s nothing new about the lovable rogue either, but Shelton
paints an entire machine of winks and nods, a community in which the
backslapping and citations barely hold self-loathing and mutual betrayal at
bay.

Shelton films the
whole thing in a zippy, documentary-flavoured style, which achieves a
substantial payoff at the end, where the verdict comes out and the streets go
haywire. Truth is, I’m not sure the juxtaposition with the King incident really
counts for much. It’s mainly a backdrop (although a terrific one which
underlines the awfully fragile state of the LAPD’s relationship to the
community), and as such the film can be accused of exploitation. But at the
risk of sounding cynical, can’t they all nowadays?

The Life of David Gale

Take for example
Alan Parker’s The Life of David Gale,
in which Kevin Spacey plays a former anti-death penalty activist who’s now on
Death Row himself, and Kate Winslet is a reporter running round trying to save
his hide as time runs out. The people who hate this film really hate it. Roger
Ebert gave it zero stars, and wrote: “this movie is about as corrupt,
intellectually bankrupt and morally dishonest as it could possibly be without
David Gale actually hiring himself out as a joker at the court of Saddam
Hussein.”

But Ebert’s primary
objection turns out to be ideological: “I am sure the filmmakers believe their
film is against the death penalty. I believe it supports it and hopes to
discredit the opponents of the penalty as unprincipled fraudsters.” The
problem, I think, is that Ebert approaches the movie as a serious work, rather
than as a piece of trash. I thought Parker’s last two films, Evita and Angela’s Ashes, were about as wretched as it gets, and thus I now
expect nothing from him except flashy tackiness. With this mindset in place
going in, David Gale turns out to be
a reasonable piece of corn, nothing more. Given advances in preservation
technology, we’re assured of having it with us forever, but we really won’t
need it.

Sunday, April 10, 2016

I’ll admit to a
slight jealousy of people who completely immerse themselves in a fictional
world: who watch the movies or TV shows until they’ve memorized them, read
every relevant publication, start their own websites, passionately debate
minutiae with fellow fans, attend conventions and – if their dreams come true –
get married to someone who’s just as nuts about the whole thing as they are. Currently,
of course, the main focus for such activity is the second Lord of the Rings movie – The
Two Towers. To me, it’s just another movie at best, and that’s the
healthier approach to it, all things considered. I do hate to miss out on a
good time though.

I’ve been through
various obsessions with one mythology or another, with all the symptoms: the
list making, the cataloguing, the accumulation of memorabilia. As a kid, I was
into Disney – really into Disney. At
5 or 6, I could tell you who provided the voices for all the characters, and I
was pretty well up on the animators too. That evaporated when I was 7 or 8, to
be replaced by the British TV show Doctor
Who.

Getting into movies

For those who don’t
know, this was a weekly half-hour show chronicling the adventures of a “Time
Lord” who traveled through space and time in a spacecraft that, from the
outside, looked like an old-fashioned police phone booth (Doctor Who is the sole reason why anyone under the age of 40 knows
there were ever such things as police phone booths). Whenever the lead actor
quit the role, the Doctor would regenerate into a new body and personality,
thus allowing the show a new lease of life. My primary interest in it coincided
with the dashing Jon Pertwee, after whom the actors became ever more
lightweight. The show petered out in the mid-90s, although one often reads
about plans for a revival, or a big screen version.

This broadened into
an interest in science fiction generally. I’ve read a lot of Asimov and
Heinlein and the others, but all before the age of 11 or 12. Of course, much of
the genre is quite violent and/or sexual, so I was really getting away with
something. Then, around the time of the first Star Trek movie in 1979, I became a Trekker. This seems now like a
backward step – I think maybe keeping up with the entire genre was too arduous.
I started buying movie magazines just for the Trek articles, and it’s really
around then that I became seriously interested in film as a whole.

I can still remember
drawing up one of my first film want-to-see lists, which included such gems as Private Benjamin and Hopscotch. The first adult-rated movie I
sneaked into was Altered States; the
second was Heaven’s Gate. Of course, Heaven’s Gate is famous for being a
movie that no one went to see, so my wayward streak must already have been
taking shape. I got into foreign movies around the same time, and since then –
for over twenty years now – I’ve kept my passion for film burning pretty
steadily. My records show there was a period of several months in 1984 when I
hardly watched any movies at all, but I’ve completely forgotten what that was
all about.

Repeat viewings

The main
characteristic of my film thing has been a desire to see just about everything,
which has consistently kept me from multiple viewings, intensive background
reading, or from watching all those extras that come with DVDs (I’ve never
listened to any of the commentary tracks on any of the disks I own). I’ve
written before about the fatigue that sometimes accompanies this tendency.
Without question, I’d like to linger more, to contemplate, to debate, to go
back, to look again. But I haven’t done the latter since Bamboozled. A friend of mine recently went to see Talk to Her twice within the same week,
placing a second viewing ahead of The
Hours and Gangs of New York and About Schmidt and numerous other recent
releases he hadn’t seen. This struck me as a Don Quixote-like endeavor – noble,
and completely impractical.

Even so, I think I
generally squeeze out some reasonable engagement with what a movie is all about
(otherwise of course, there really would be no point at all). But I’m not best
suited to films of sprawling complexities and multi-layered back stories and
dozens of characters – the kind of movie where aficionados pore over detailed
notes on the web and compare it to the book in painstaking detail. I went to
see the first Lord of the Rings film,
with its lengthy opening narrative about the origin of the rings and the lords
of darkness, throwing around names and defining the parameters of its imaginary
universe. I remember saying to myself: what the hell is all this about. By the
time it got to Bilbo Baggins and his eleventy-first birthday, I’d had enough
already. But I stayed, for the dullest sixteen – uh, sorry, three hours of last
year.

I swore I wouldn’t
be coming back for the other two movies and by golly I meant it. Nothing about
the reviews for The Two Towers changed
my mind. But then, just like its predecessor, it started to get nominated for
awards – Golden Globes, and then Oscars. And I couldn’t stand not seeing one of
the five Oscar-nominated movies – I haven’t been in that position for decades.
So I went for it, despite severe misgivings.

The Two Towers

It helped that by
the time I got round to it the theater was almost empty. I could spread out and
enjoy the extra-large supply of snacks I’d smuggled in. Initially, I wondered
whether I’d have enough to get me through the experience. The movie starts up
right where its predecessor left off, with no recap or summary, and I’ve
forgotten most of what I needed to know.

But ultimately it
didn’t matter. The Two Towers is
essentially a series of one-off action sequences, with far less exposition and
dialogue than the first movie. It’s all well staged, and on this occasion I
found myself better able to appreciate the unique fusion of spectacularly
authentic New Zealand landscapes with digital and other wizardry: it’s a far
more tangible-feeling fantasy than most of the genre. New cast members like
Bernard Hill and Miranda Otto add to the gravity and nuance that others
detected in the first film. On the whole, it didn’t feel like a minute over,
well, three hours.

Of course, the only
reason I enjoyed the film is that it allowed me to ignore all the Tolkienish
elements I have no patience for. Whether this makes it a good or a bad
adaptation, I don’t know. I would go online and research what the Tolkien crowd
is saying about it, but I don’t have the time.

Sunday, April 3, 2016

Alexander
Payne made an amazing leap in 1999 with Election,
a film that may well have deserved the Oscar that year. It’s wise and nuanced
and complex, with scintillating characters and dialogue. And completely easy to
watch. Almost no one makes art like that. A few years later, he’s back with About Schmidt, set again in his home
state of Nebraska, but with an added element that surely says all you need to
know about Payne’s post-Election
credibility: it stars Jack Nicholson.

I don’t
mean to take a cheap shot when I say that there’s a problem with any movie that
casts Nicholson as an insurance executive who’s let all his chances get away
from him. Some of the greatest performances come from casting against type, and
Nicholson’s work here is a superior piece of acting, no question about it. But
there’s no point pretending we watch movies in a vacuum. Star image contributes
to the fabric of a film as surely as the lighting or the music. And About Schmidt has a problem: almost
every element of Nicholson’s well-established persona works against the role
he’s playing.

Who’s this woman?

For
example, Nicholson says in voice over, talking about his tired 42-year-old
marriage, that he wakes up every morning and wonders who this old woman is in
his bed. June Squibb, the actress playing his wife, is just two years older
than Nicholson, so she’s certainly an age-appropriate partner for him. But it’s
impossible not to think of his affair with Lara Flynn Boyle and other facets of
his legendary reputation. The relationship with Squibb becomes easy to chuckle
at and to treat as fanciful, whereas Schmidt’s sense of entrapment should
surely be painful.

The
problem intensifies once Schmidt’s wife dies. He goes to seed for a while, then
sets himself a mission – to abort his daughter’s forthcoming marriage to a man
that Schmidt thinks is an idiot (Hope Davis and Dermot Mulroney play the
couple). He sets off in his Winnebago, reliving some past memories along the
way. But Nicholson’s presence skews the film to the point that you don’t know
how to take it. In some ways, Schmidt is clearly a creature of his environment,
sharing the same basic values, generating the same banal remarks. On the other
hand, he senses himself slipping out of sync with those surroundings, and
becomes preoccupied by time running out. Nicholson, though, is so inherently out of sync that you can’t
help perceiving it as an abstract rather than as an emotional dilemma. The
movie, broadly speaking, is about Schmidt’s attempts to find equilibrium after
he’s forced into a new phase of his life. But with Nicholson in the role,
there’s no possible equilibrium.

Some
critics feel more strongly about this than I do. David Edelstein in Slate compared the film to watching an
episode of The Twilight Zone: “A
Nicholson who doesn’t unleash the full force of his libidinous counterculture
energy,” says Edelstein, “is a Nicholson unrealized.” I don’t think that’s
quite right – Nicholson kept it bottled up in The Pledge, with great success. But that film was dense with
mythmaking – it didn’t need verisimilitude in the way that About Schmidt does.

Every man’s reasons

Another
problem with About Schmidt is that
it’s primarily a dramatic piece (I think so anyway – the Golden Globes
categorized it as a drama rather than a comedy), but it evokes laughs at every
turn, and I’m rather uneasy about the source of those laughs. Basically, the
film patronizes Midwesterners, reducing them to shallow nincompoops who live
entirely through clichés and lack any philosophical perspective on their
idiocy. To take one example out of many: in a bedroom decorated with Mulroney’s
childhood mementos, the camera sticks on a shot of a certificate he earned for
perfect attendance during some low-grade two-week college course. It gets a big
laugh from the audience. But it tells us nothing new about the character, and
it’s just an easy little dig at a culture that would recognize such limited
accomplishment, and of a person who would accept it as a compliment. Fine, but
as laughs go it’s like stealing candy from a baby, and where does it get you?

In
slightly more considerate hands, About
Schmidt might have drawn on Jean Renoir’s famous dictum (I apologize for
once again using one of the most over-quoted lines in cinema): Every man has
his reasons. Schmidt thinks Mulroney’s character is a fool who’s unworthy of
his daughter, and he dreams of sabotaging the wedding, but in the end he keeps
his mouth shut and plays along. “Look at these people!” he declares vis a vis
Mulroney’s family, but there’s no substantive way in which he’s better than
them (unless, of course, you see him as Jack Nicholson rather than as Warren
Schmidt). Indeed, maybe that’s the main thing Schmidt should have been forced
to realize. Either way, Renoir’s philosophy underlay Election far more than it does About
Schmidt.

But the
film has any number of compensations. It has terrific attention to detail, and
you’ll seldom get such an authentic whiff of mid-price hotels and restaurants,
of officers and trailer parks and living rooms. And reservations aside, it is often very funny. It sets its own
pace, never breaking away from Schmidt himself, maintaining a kind of shocked
geniality that may well sum up the mid-West.

Letter from Africa

And the
film has a highly beguiling voice over, as Schmidt sets out his life in letters
to a 6 year old African boy that he’s sponsoring for $22 a month. The device
provides yet more incongruity, as Schmidt recounts mundane local details to a
little boy who has no possible sense of the culture (always ending with a banal
closing such as “Hope things are fine with you.”) We only ever see the boy in a
photograph, yet in some weird way he’s the second most indelible presence in
the movie (Kathy Bates’ much-praised turn as the mother of the groom was too
familiar for my taste, and the rest of the cast isn’t really given enough to
work with.) Schmidt’s connection with the kid actually is something that does
set him aside – it’s his main claim to transcend his surroundings. Which is why
when the movie makes this explicit in its final scene, it’s an intensely moving
moment for Schmidt, and I think for most of the audience as well.

Nicholson’s
career is so rich that he doesn’t need to add to it, and yet About Schmidt may win him a fourth
Oscar. He may deserve it, and yet however strongly one assesses his acting, the
fact remains that the film might have worked better with a less known actor in
the role. But then it might also have been dumped straight to cable. Reading
this article over, I feel I’ve understated the enjoyment I got out of the film.
But after Election, we were entitled
to expect something amazing. As much as Nicholson plays against type, in the
end he does the film a big disfavor. He makes it just too easy to watch.

About Me

From 1997 to 2014 I wrote a weekly movie column for Toronto's Outreach Connection newspaper. The paper has now been discontinued and I've stopped writing new articles, but I continue to post my old ones here over time. I also aim to post a daily movie review on Twitter (torontomovieguy) and I occasionally tweet on other matters (philosopherjack).